#14 The Puglia Region of Southeastern Italy, The Heel
of the Boot: October 3 - 19, 2007
Launching: To & From Bari
Public transportation can deliver shockingly
abrupt changes to normally slow-moving cyclotourists and that was the case in taking the 9 hour overnight
ferry from Dubrovnik, Croatia to Bari on Italy's southeastern coast. We went to bed having
the Croatian language, culture, and currency shaping our days and the next
morning it was back to the Italian language and the Euro.
We'd made this journey to Bari before and hadn't any great
memories of it. Our prior experience with a poor-value, inner city hotel in the throbbing port
hub short on tourist attractions
had us planning to pedal out of Bari as quickly as possible. But the warm,
fall morning air was more inviting than our previous arrival in the chill of winter
and lingering for some necessary shopping was quickly rewriting the Bari script.
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Bill deposited me and our loaded bikes in a manicured, inner
city park while he
headed out to tick-off items on his chore list: maps for the next 2 months;
Farewell to Arms in Italian; a guide book for Tunisia, just in case we
detoured there; lodging information for the region; EU cash from an ATM; and bread
and tuna to complete our lunch. Unlike in Croatia, he was able to easily do all
of those chores in an hour. The greater affluence of decidedly urban Bari made
running errands a snap, especially in comparison to
anywhere we'd been in Croatia.
I took my turn to do a little window shopping and as a
consumer, felt the
relief of being out of Croatia, of being where there was more of everything.
What a thrill to go into a multi-storied bookstore and see all of the
possibilities. In Croatia, the bookstores we found were mini-market-sized. I
celebrated the diversity by purchasing a $5, pocket-sized Italian cookbook to
round out our vocabulary lessons. It was a joy to be immersed in abundance, to be
surrounded by choice instead of being in more of a "make do" consumer environment.
We left the city after picnicking in the park and the differences between Croatia and
Italy quickly blurred. We rode along the coastline, which had a similar feel to
Croatia. The half-finished buildings, the occasional piles of trash and roadside
litter, and the crumbling infrastructure seem to be a common theme in the
Mediterranean countries. The coastline around Bari was however pancake flat,
whereas Croatia's coastline is a constant wiggle, both in the vertical and
horizontal planes. Predictably, the first afternoon of riding in Italy was
easier, but not as pretty as our days in Croatia.
The following morning's ride underscored other welcome
differences between Croatia and Italy, which were the price and availability of
food. Inexplicably, food in Croatia is 2 to 3 times higher than the EU, even
though the standard of living is substantially lower. And it isn't just on the
imports either, as even the prices on Croatian produced items like their olive oil were high,
even higher than some of the imported Italian products sold in Croatia.
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With Croatian prices still my standard, I
stopped at a town square vendor's table eyeing his brilliant yellow, casaba-like
melons. I settled on my top price, which would be about $4 for a small specimen. I
had to confirm my translation with Bill as I
couldn't believe it when the man quoted me the equivalent of about 45 cents a pound.
We walked away with a hefty melon and 2 tantalizing persimmons for about $2--an unheard of
value in Croatia. This detour immediately lead to a second, which was into the adjacent park where we
cracked open the melon after giving it a quick
rinse. Images of daily, mid-morning melon breaks filled our minds as we slurped
and savored the luscious fruit.
Alberobello ('beautiful tree")
It wasn't long until our route drifted slightly inland as we headed southeast
along the heel of Italy's boot. Bill expected quieter roads and more pleasant
scenery off the coast road, though he didn't anticipate the riding to be so enchanting.
The trashiness of the flat
littoral region quickly gave way to a tidier appearance and more hills, though
it was not particularly high. The land
looked more cared for, more valued, and the new rhythm of changing shapes and
colors was very pleasing. It wasn't spectacular scenery but consistently pleasant,
which is good enough, especially under the brilliant autumn skies.
Bill had been a bit too cool about what was to soon pepper
the scenery, which were the rustic yet surreal trulli stone homes. For
centuries, until 1797, the locals were not allowed to use mortar on their homes
and settled on a beehive-shaped stone building style--the trullo. During our
several-hour approach to the hilltop city of Alberobello, we saw the little buildings in isolation or
small clusters. But it was still a shock to find a sea of hundreds of these rustic homes in
a centuries- old urban setting at Alberobello.
I expected a walk among the squat, rickety looking stone dwellings to be one of those
penetrating experiences that would take me back in time, like walking Dubrovnik's
ramparts
for the first time or tripping through the teaming back alleys of Cairo in 2006. But my voyage
through Alberobello's time
machine was derailed by the intense commercialism in the stone labyrinth. My
eagerness to cross time boundaries wasn't enough to filter out the pervasive
souvenir shops. With every turn I made expecting to be shielded from the hype, I
was confronted with yet another row of vendors. And I could imagine that staying
at the 5 star hotel that boasts a 'trulli experience' wouldn't take one back in time either.
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| Alberobello's trulli town. | A closer view of trulli's, now with the benefit of stucco. |
Disappointed with the retail sensory barrage, we turned our attention to the more authentic looking trulli, the ones outside of the central cluster and those outside of the city itself. It was in those places that the simplicity and harshness of that earlier lifestyle was palpable, it was there that we could imagine another time.
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Walled-Around vs Walled-In
From about the same era as the trulli, roughly the 1400's, the
cities of Locorotondo and Martina Franca could not have been more different from
the
originally mortar-less Alberobello. The step back in time they offered was not
of the harsh, rustic, and simple lifestyle but that of grand building
sprees--with mortar. Trulli were made of rough hewn stone collected in local
fields where as these other cities were built of finely dressed, quarried stone
with later baroque flourishes. These were dignified old cities, poised on the
low hilltops, surrounded by stone walls with humbling gates.
It was interesting to drift back through my memories of being in Dubrovnik,
Croatia earlier in our week, a "must see" city in my book for giving
one a sense of
life in a walled city centuries ago. Being in Italy highlighted why Dubrovnik is
unique in the Mediterranean, as it is a profoundly walled-in city.
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Not only do Dubrovnik's massive walls still
completely enclose the old town, but they are as high as the tops of the multi-storied
building rooftops. Walking around the perimeter on the old city's ramparts
and looking down into the town is dramatic. One feels that all that's missing to completely protect
Dubrovnik is to have a lid on the top. In contrast, these lovely
Italian walled cities were "walled around" not "walled in." They
were more defensively situated on low hill tops than seaside Dubrovnik, but the Italian
cities' enveloping walls were short of the 3 storied buildings contained within.
Once inside one of these Puglian cities, the walls dropped from your awareness, which was never the case
within Dubrovnik's more domineering walls.
Our Lonely Planet
guide book referred to Locorotondo's interior as a "warren of streets" and I realized I could not
readily
define "warren". My electronic dictionary made reference to "a network of rabbit burrows"
and "a densely populated or labyrinthine district" and the later was an apt
description of what we were experiencing in the Puglia region.
Again, it was interesting to think back to Dubrovnik. Though more convincingly "walled in," Dubrovnik's
interior wouldn't qualify as a "warren". It has a
consumptively broad central street and many of the secondary streets form a
neat grid. The narrow stone alleys are enchanting, but very regular and linear
feeling. Even for a visitor, it is hard to become disoriented in Dubrovnik. In
contrast, the small southern Italian walled city of Locorotondo felt like a
place in which I could easily get lost. And in the larger Martina Franca,
I found myself doing orienteering by the laundry hanging from the balconies that I was seeing for the second
time as the blind alleys, twists and turns, and dips were
disorienting and the street names of no use.
Behind Closed Doors
Italy is one of those many Mediterranean countries in
which one is confronted by
endless walls of closed doors and windows in the town streets during siesta. It's like
being the in Twilight Zone for us. The whole town can be devoid of life and sometimes
the paucity of business signs leaves one clueless as to what lies behind any of those closed
doors.
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When siesta is over, which can be anywhere between
3 and 6pm, the clattering of the roll-up metal doors in motion signals that the
secrets are being revealed. Fruit vendors, stationery goods, bakeries, and
other small markets come out of hiding. Some of the wooden bi-fold doors of
residences will open, usually disclosing a curtain of a strand-like door
covering. I was often taken aback by all the lively commerce that was within
a few feet of our latest lodging once siesta was over.
We stayed in ground level apartments in both Locorotondo and
Lecce, apartments that were in irregularly shaped and endlessly meandering buildings. Our street-level quarters,
like all the other nearby ground level spaces I peeked in, had barrel vaulted and domed ceilings.
Those tunnel-shaped ceilings plus the twists, turns, and jogs in the floor plan
suggested that Locorotondo and Lecce were "warrens" inside and out:
the streets were a
labyrinth, the interiors were like rabbit burrows.
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Presumably the upper 2 stories gave way to square ceilings, but the sturdy shape
of the base layers all seemed to rely upon the dome. And like many of the cave-like homes
we'd seen in similar old towns over the years, our 3-roomed apartments had no windows. The only
glass was on the smallish doors and those had wooden covers latched over them.
I often get a restlessness that borders on claustrophobia when I can't see out
of a room, but fortunately our apartments were so charmingly decorated that the
cozy-burrow feeling overcame the trapped-animal response to the tunnel like spaces.
Unfamiliar Rhythms
Circumstances conspired against our usual plans and on
one of our first days back in Italy, we were suddenly in sync with the local rhythm:
we had lingered in the small city park at hilltop Martina Franca for almost 3 hours. First,
we needed to eat lunch and then we took turns watching the bikes and touring the
old town on foot. The sunny warmth of the early October day made it easy to sit and
being
freshly stocked with a guide book for Tunisia, Farewell to Arms, and a
tiny cookbook--all in Italian--meant that we both had plenty of reading we were eager to
begin.
We watched the hoards of young school kids with their parents
troop through our park on their way to lunch, which were then followed by waves
of unescorted, restless teenagers. We listened to the metal, roll-down doors bang shut as
the merchants across the street each closed for lunch (including the restaurant). The city became quiet and
eerily still. It was just us, the pigeons, and a few inebriated men looking at
the betting newspapers still out and about.
Shopping, going to museums, or asking for directions during
siesta in Italy is hopeless and we've always known that the proper activity for us
was to be resting too. But others have homes to go to at midday and our
home away from home doesn't materialize until evening, so this was a rare
opportunity to 'go Italian' during siesta, though on a park bench.
The only problem was when it came time to continue our day's
journey, our nervous
systems went into a state of shock. Shifting from the intoxicating
tranquility of the hours of relaxation put us in a compromised state for dealing
with Italian traffic. To them, the nudging, prodding, pushing, and darting they
do with a car is normal whereas we feel like we are under siege. I struggled to
rally the concentration and resolve needed from my drifty mind to safely be in the fray. Opening car doors,
cars appearing out of nowhere, and deep holes on the steep downhill city street all came
at me too quickly.
Somehow we managed to navigate through the turbulent urban
traffic and then we were thrown out on a main road with the trucks. It was a harsh
reminder that our usual rhythm was probably safer. Better for us to be pedaling
during siesta when the traffic volume is down and to have our skills well
honed when the post-siesta traffic press begins.
Hard-Wired Culture
Self-discovery on many levels has been one of the
luxuries of extended travel. Constantly changing living spaces, shattered old routines, social isolation, new
challenges, simple living, and immersion in other cultures are some of the
elements of travel that put multi-faceted mirrors before us each day. We see
ourselves differently than before because of it.
One particularly amusing discovery when in the Mediterranean
region was realizing that
Bill and I both go into a little trance when we ride through a pine forest on a day
hot enough to layer pitch resin aromas on the breezes. We both inhale the
fragrance deeply and slowly to savor it.
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For both of us, that hot-day pine resin
scent was wired into our psyches as children. We only smelled that aroma when
camping with our families in the mountains. And that particular scent only
occurred if it was
sunny and very warm, perhaps hot. The subsequent association was that everyone
in the family was a good mood
because we were experiencing the hoped-for good weather on the much-anticipated family vacation.
Forever more, we'll both have a little high when we catch that particular scent
in the wind--a scent tightly linked with happy times as children.
Just as wired-in as this "pine resin scent = good times" are
the social or cultural routines that put us at ease. We are very aware that we
feel the most at home when in the northern European countries like Switzerland,
Germany, and Austria. In those countries, our expectations of mundane routines
are met: the traffic stays in the lanes, the next person in line is the next
served, pedestrians cross the street when the "Walk" sign is green, and business hours are posted on the door.
Those aspects of daily living move into the background when in northern Europe
as there are few surprises, all is as it should be according to our US
upbringing.
But for those with a northern European cultural bias, moving through
public spaces like one is in a smooth running
factory is not what happens when in Italy, especially southern Italy. We've been
there before, we know to expect it, we know what is normal for the region, and it
still knocks us off center. The sense of well-ordered factory routines when
mingling with the public shifts to chaos. To us,
the Italian behavioral norm
looks like a herd of sheep in startle response. Instead of neat rows of cars and people,
we are confronted with a scene that looks like scared sheep running every-which-way, then ending in an
immobilized clump.
Italian traffic looks like a nightmare to us. Traffic lanes
and directional signs appear only to be suggestions. Cars driving backwards on
streets and either direction on sidewalks are ordinary sightings. There can be 3
oncoming cars side-by-side on a 2 lane highway in a passing frenzy. And we sometimes think we are
going the wrong way on a 1-way street as most of the cars parked on the right
side of the road are parked coming towards us. When school lets out for lunch,
traffic in some towns becomes a snarl and then stops entirely.
In addition to string of broken rules in traffic, our
pragmatic side
is offended by all of the stores in
a town or region being closed on a particular weekday as a regular rest day,
but with no signs on the door saying so. And except for the fashion stores
and largest supermarkets, generally no business hours are posted at all. If
hours are posted, they often aren't accurate. And there certainly is no
express line in the market to bypass the single clerk who has become totally
occupied by gift wrapping a half dozen packages for a customer.
Our hard-wired expectations perceive the traffic as
aggressive and dangerous; we see the lunchtime school routines and gift wrapping
at grocery stores as avoidable inefficiencies; and the irregular and un-posted
business hours register in us as absurd. But it is Italy, and the people are wired differently
from their childhood. It's all normal to them; it's the way they expect things
to be.
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We remind ourselves that their driving style isn't aggressive
by their standards and I'm sure that the drivers aren't experiencing a flood of
stress hormones as American drivers would in the same situation. We no longer
look at the chaotic array of motorists converging on a single point at an
intersection as aggressive driving but instead see that each driver is merely disclosing
what they want: both where they want to go and that they'd really like to be
next.
No one usually pushes the point. If we are in the fray, we need to decisively
take the right of way when it is ours, and no one takes issue with it. We get our
turn, but we must be clear about our intention. It's a "announce yourself"
driving culture, not a "it's your turn" style.
Watching the parents and grandparents converge on schools in
cars, on bikes, and by foot at lunchtime is a bizarre sight. It often coincides
with our lunch break and we watch from park benches in amazement. Special police
and monitors are out there blowing whistles, directing traffic, and managing
those insistent motorists. It looks like a stunning waste of resources, both
directly used in organizing the chaos and indirectly for all the other people bogged down in the jam. And yet
how treasured each child must feel when met and escorted home at
lunchtime as the traffic comes to a standstill for the ritual.
The same social affirmations as for these children occur at
the markets where all commercial activity freezes for as long as it takes for the
clerk to wrap a customer's single or half dozen gifts. I've learned to go on to the next market if I can when this
social routine is unfolding, especially if I'm making a single purchase. My
sense of efficiency and productivity is wildly offended by these scenes, but
that is the courtesy that Italians have grown up expecting to receive as customers.
I can't imagine that we will ever become at ease with the
traffic chaos and the commercial inefficiencies that permeate our days while in
Italy as we were socialized to a different standard. But with each visit we are more quickly able
to remind ourselves not to judge the conventions by our expectations, but
instead to accept
that this is the way these folks are wired--its their version of 'pine resin
scent' programming.
Oasis
When in the grand old city of Lecce on Italy's boot, I
quickly found myself describing it as an oasis. We'd ridden for hours through the ugly
littoral lands from Brindisi. The flat and overused, disused, or abandoned
land looked pitiful. It was hard to imagine what would revive the earth to make
it vital again. It had the look of harboring a contagion that I didn't want
contaminating my mind or my body.
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Coming into Lecce, even in the rain, was a delight. The
once walled city with its labyrinth of narrow streets still had a walled-in
feeling, which was welcome. I wanted that dreary land kept out there, held
safely away from
us. I was delighted with the secure feeling of the old town and to be able to turn my attention to the grand architecture
for a pleasing visual experience.
Usually it's the other way around, usually we are happy to
move out of confining urban spaces to a park or the surrounding land. But here
it was different, here we wanted to be rescued from the wasted-appearing land.
Lecce felt like an oasis surrounded by empty desert.
I was ironic to be calling this city an oasis after having
been in 2 Egyptian oases in 2006. The contrast between Lecce and its
surroundings was greater and more dramatic than between Siwi Oasis and its
desert surroundings. In Lecce, the difference was night and day: featureless,
scruffy, beat-up looking low land gave way to beautiful buildings, interesting
plazas, and lively people energy. In Siwi, Egypt the parched, sandy desert followed us
into the oasis, with the 1 and 2 storey buildings being made of the same
material.
Nowhere in Siwi were there the lush green gardens that had been my
image of an oasis. The oasis water in Siwi and the other oasis we visited
was well channeled to support date palm and other dry-looking trees in isolated
orchards. The dust
still kicked up around our feet when we walked and there was nothing pleasing
about any of the vegetation. The oasis did provide shade and water for the
weary, but little visual relief. In Lecce with its wonderful sensory experiences, I
found myself needing a new word to replace what an oasis used to represent.
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Lecca Layover--The Long Story
We extended our stay in Lecce from 3 nights to 5, with
the short answer being "Because of the rain". But the long answer sheds light on
the convolutions of our cyclotouring reality. Once we arrived back in Italy, we
did a little too much shopping. We could absorb the 3 books in Italian, but it
was that space heater I bought that pushed us over the edge.
Bill had long fantasized about having our own space heater
for winter travel, so when I stumbled across a compact number at a grocery store for $12, I grabbed
it. At a maximum of 800 watts, we wouldn't risk blowing fuses or blowing our
cover in hotel rooms.
I had correctly assessed that I could stand the slim heater on
edge and squeeze it along side the bag of food on my back rack, but it was
acting like a fin in the winds as it made my load both wider and higher. I
feared that in windier winter weather sure to come, it would compromise my bike handling. And, being
back in Italy, meant Sunday store closures and so on the weekends Chuck, the
food bag, would be bulging from extra inventory plus being squeezed by the
heater.
Clearly something would have to go. The most expendable items
were the Croatia and Slovenia guide books I was hanging on to. I was saving them
until the file on the cultural comparison of those 2 countries was completed.
When Bill reads what I've written just before uploading on to the webpage, he
often disagrees with a detail or 2 and we have to 'duke it out.' I was saving
the books as impartial references for those discussions. We decided to make a
rare layover for the primary purpose of writing so I could complete 3 web page files.
So, the long story for why we laid over in Lecce was really: so Barb
could write, then 2 books could be thrown out, and her bike would handle better
in the wind even with the extra bulk of the new heater. Being off the road for 5
days of the 8 day
rainy streak looked good in hindsight too.
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Marina di Leuca
At the all but buttoned-up resort village of Marina di
Leuca, we reached the southern most tip of the heel of Italy's boot.
It was one of those moments that
looked significant on the map, but hardly showed on the ground. The
convolutions of the coastline obscured it's geographical significance and I
instead remember the approach to it as having higher roads,
better panoramas, and an insistent tailwind.
Taranto
Once reaching the heel of Italy's boot, our route was to take
us along the sole of the boot, with the first big stop being at Taranto. But
unlike sleepy Marina di Leuca, Taranto, with its population of 200,000, was a fright to bike into, especially after
days in the quiet isolation of the deserted seaside
resort villages. The suddenly appearing trucks made being on the narrow, 2-laned
highway a nightmare. Intermittent shoulders and disintegrating pavement gave us
the "industrial grade" experience of the city without actually being in its
notorious, heavy-industry area.
After feeling like we'd been dodging bullets for hours on the
open highway with the trucks, it was yet another shock to merge with the city's
tightly packed, start-stop traffic in the deeply shadowed urban corridors. After
these dual challenges, our traumatized nervous systems hardly knew
how to react when we abruptly exited the urban-industrial chaos and were
delivered onto a broad seaside walkway and then a lovely city center park.
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A roomy formal park occupied much of the
central space between the narrow peninsula's 2 seas and the green area was the terminus for a grand pedestrianized
shopping district. It was one of those city-centers of Italy that become
electrified at night--places were a stranger can slip into the
stream of promenaders during the evening "passeggiata" stroll and savor the lively, collective energy.
Taranto's old city, "Cittą
Vecchia," across the bridge from the sparkling
retail district and park was yet another jolt in this span of only a few miles. Here, one
is compelled to accept the guide book's advise not to be there alone at night.
Our search for an archeological exhibit had us exiting after dark but we carefully joined the
other walkers on the rampart adjacent to the sea rather than feel like rats in
the
dark maze of the forbidding old town.
But in the daylight hours, the tiny old town of Taranto was
mischievously beckoning. The widest and most heavily traveled street had only
the occasional car squeezing past the few other pedestrians. Searching for the exhibit had us spending hours in this
district instead of the half hour we'd planned, but each pass through emboldened
us to deviate farther from the most inviting of the streets.
Some turns had us
tentatively walking past half boarded-up buildings and piles of trash and then
the next turn might reveal a crumbling relic being shored up with a few rooms
nearly ready for occupancy. Another twist and we were in a fully-inhabited
segment, with the ladies of the house easily carrying on 3-way conversations
between several 2nd storey balconies. Many of
the forbidding streets were too dark even in daylight to successfully photo.
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In the midst of Taranto's dark decay, "gentrified"
immediately came to mind as a way to describe the other Puglian old towns
we'd found so delightful in places like Lecce, Locorotondo, and Martina Franca. They
must have been cleaned-up and gentrified and in contrast, Taranto was not.
Taranto had a raw, rough, and forbidding exterior, though the activities of the
residents were like those of any other community.
Perhaps what was before us in Taranto was what
those other cheery old towns had looked like for most of their 500 or more years.
Perhaps a cleaned up Taranto would look charming instead of threatening. A few
remnants of a grander time in Taranto could be seen on the occasional portal,
but it was the almost enveloping, uninterrupted black grime of the stone streets and stucco surfaces that defined
the experience. Like the others, Taranto streets were a labyrinth, but Taranto's
seemed more menacing. Perhaps the streets were narrower or maybe the dingy
surfaces that prevented any play of light where direct light never struck shrank
the sense of the space.
Wandering the narrows of Taranto's old town was one of those
cherished experiences that travelers hope to tumble into--an experience that
activates all of your senses and adds a layer to your deeper understanding. We
left the back alley world of Taranto with our sensory memory more tightly
packed, ready to fill the gaps the next time we visited a spruced-up old town or read
about "life when....."
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Puglia's Grecian Roots
Taranto was our last major stop in Puglia
and the ancient Greek history of the region unfortunately had been left to our
imaginations. There had been tantalizing bits in our guide book about the
coastal towns around more northern Otranto as having begun as Greek settlements and
of places
where the speaking of Greek had only recently ceased.
We read that Taranto was
founded in the 7th century bce by exiles from Sparta and grew to a city of
300,000 (larger than it is today) but there was little exposed to reveal that past. Their museum,
considered one of the most important archeological museums in Italy, apparently
suffers from a common syndrome--terminal-renovation--and is effectively closed
permanently. An obscurely located temporary exhibit was more striking for its
prehistoric finds than its Spartan past. The other Puglian archeological museum, in Brindisi,
was also closed indefinitely. So, disappointed, we left the Puglia region with its ancient
Greek history being a stray bit of information floating in and out of our minds,
rather than a knowing anchored by potent visual experiences.
Where We Are Now: November 28, 2007
We've just completed our preliminary loop of western
Sicily and are back in Trąpani on the northwestern tip of the island. Our biking
loop began and ended in Trąpani as it is the departure point for our flight to
Germany in 3 days. We arrive in Dusseldorf on Saturday, December 1 and on
Wednesday the 5th we'll fly to Portland from Frankfurt on that wonderful,
relatively new nonstop Lufthansa flight. Somewhere in between we'll be taking a
train to Frankfurt.
As always, it is a time of conflicted emotions. On one hand
we look forward to reconnecting with family and friends back home; on the other,
it would be simpler to just keep pedaling.
Love,
Barb
